Gotta love slow cooking

Slow Cooker

I finally bought a slow cooker after recommendation from multiple people I’ve only used it a couple times but every time so far its turned out really good food.

To be fair its almost the total opposite of the way I usually cook. I’m more of a 20mins and I’m done in the kitchen kind of guy. The wok is my friend, hence why I have about 8 of them (all different sizes ranging from 8 inches to 16 inches)

My lovely mum sent me a slow cooking cook book which has been handy for working out roughly what I can or can not do. Generally it seems most of the time, you can throw stuff into the pot, add a ton of vegetables, spices and a bit of meat, then leave it to cook.

The other day I left it cooking while I went out and then by the time I got back it was very late and so I left it cooking over night. So maybe left it cooking for about 18 hours in total. I was a little worried if it was ok to leave it on for so long, you know wake up to a massive fire or a burned out slow cooker but I woke up to a lovely smell of cooked onions and veg. The beef was extremely tender and like the chicken I’d had before almost flaked apart when forked.

The weird part is, I’ve found you don’t need so much meat, so my intake of meat is greatly reduced by the slow cooking process.

I’m catching the slow cooking vibe…as my boss said, its kind of addictive in a funny way. Although I do tend have my wok ready when I just want something quick.

Larkin about with Stranger on the 11th Floor

At the ARG start outside the nexus art cafe on Twitpic

I was invited by Tim Dobson via Facebook to a Manchester ARG (alernative reality game) called Stranger on the 11th Floor setup by a organisation called Larkin about. Never ever heard of them before but I was intrigued and thought i’d give it a shot.

Now I want to be sure people understand that all the comments I have, I did say to them on the day and I think they would admit most of the points I make are fair.

So we started off at the Nexus Art Cafe (somewhere I’ve never actually heard or been before) and we were explained the basic premise of the game, split into 4 different teams, given a map of the northern quarter and some numbers of people in-case things go wrong. Then we were given a clue and location to start. Ours was a phone box in Stevenson Square.

My team pretty much pelted out of the Nexus Cafe and zoomed to the phone box. Later catching up with them, just in time to see one of the girls on the phone. She was given the clue and quickly told a few people around her and before you know it they were treking down the road towards Piccadilly. That was pretty much the last time I saw the team. What a joke…!

I refer to slide 26 and 27 of Dan Hon’s Everything we know transmedia wrong for the rest of the critique.

No more… Waiting, Solving stupid puzzles, Not telling me what to do, Lazy calls to action, Treasure hunts, Jumping through fucking hoops. Bad storytelling is just bad storytelling.

Stranger on the 11th floor turned into a massive treasure hunt with lazy call to actions, annoying hoops to jump through and frankly bad story telling. Once again no offensive to the Larkin’ about crew. They did everything correct and pulling off a open source ARG in the middle of Manchester on a busy Saturday night must have been one heck of a job.

So its time to put up or shutup… I’m thinking about adapting the ARG we tried to run in Edinburgh "We Dream the City" to a ARG in Manchester. This will be one heck of a challenge and will take a long while to get going but in the meantime, I think larkin about is a great place to run the next Manchester werewolf chapter, so keep your eyes peeled for that…

Could farmville be the cruel deception?

Sherry Turkle

I still love IT Conversations for programmes like Tech Nation, I had never heard of Sherry Turkle till today (or at least I’d never paid attention).

Dr. Moira Gunn talks with author and MIT Professor, Sherry Turkle, about her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other. In it, she talks about how peoples relationships with their devices is effective their human relationships.

In the interview Sherry talks about her book (which I’m thinking about buying as my first Kindle DRM ebook) and at the end she gets on to the subject of the cruel deception of live enough AI.

I’ve discussed to death the onslaught of social games on Facebook and other systems and my ultimate hate for them but it was on the techgrumps podcast. When Sherry mentioned the cruel deception of live enough AI, this for me is exactly that and one of the saddest things you can imagine.

The notion of grandparents using farmville because they were too old to maintain a proper garden.

Theres no words which sums up this reality more that a cruel deception…

I am a ethical serial dater?

Dating for Domokuns

I heard the term a while ago while watching a channel4 documentary and someone was talking about it in a cafe once. but forgot about it till recently after seeing another documentary about a similar topic.

From Urban Dictionary, a serial dater

One who engages in the process of systematically dating an obscene amount people in short span of time. This definition encompasses but is not limited to internet dating, bar dating, long distance flirtations, phone service dating, blind dating, expiration dating, match making, one night stands, friends with benefits, and personal ad surfing. Can be considered a politically correct alternative to word "player" both with and without a negative connotation.

Examples

  1. You do not want to date my roommate, that guy is such a serial dater.
  2. Good luck getting anything meaningful out of her, she’s too much into serial dating.

People I know have committed that I go on a lot of dates, but they only know the half of it. I tend to keep that side quiet because it would be very unfair for me to blog, tweet, etc about someone else. Specially those who turned out to be… well… best say… interesting dates. Maybe I should start a secret blog and write about my experiences on dates many other have.

I reject the notion that I’m a player because I’m not, I just enjoy meeting new people and well I love meeting woman. In actual fact I have 2 dates this week *smile*

What more can I say… I’m a ethical serial dater?

Talking of which, we’re currently planing the complete series of Geeks talk Sexy after our most successful episode yet. Following the success of Tara Hunt, we’ve been thinking about having more guests join us. It looks like we may have roped in some great guests including a couple of pickup artists. More news soon…

Evernote take notes from Dropbox and Rescuetime

I’ve said it many times but Evernote really winds me up no end. I even went down the completely open route for a while using Tomboy Notes and there online service. To be honest the only reason why I switched back was because of Nevernote and the fact Tomdroid, couldn’t sync with any online service unless you transfered the notes via SD card.

However I started thinking via Dropbox, it would be trivial to do the syncing part. The only issue left seems to be about the fact tomdroid doesn’t seem to support editing or anything like that.

Anyway, the thing is going back to Evernote. Is I’ve been looking around some of my other apps I also pay for. Dropbox is the key example here.

Dropbox does support Linux but to be fair there a little behind the windows and mac versions. Not by much but its understandable. Rescue time don’t officially seem to support linux but they do unofficially support someone elses linux uploader, it would seem.

The fact is Evernote could really help there dominance by helping Nevernote. If they don’t Tomboy notes isn’t that far behind and will rise up and become the choice for many people.

Beyond the data: making meaning of data

Ian Forrester at Next 09

The Next conference is looking for speakers for 2011 and they have opened a public voting system to seek out the next generation of speakers. Of course I have put a talk based around the Channelography project.

Beyond the data

Data is something we have been working with before it became mainstream a few years ago. We have many projects using data but what are the challenges once you have the data? Using the prototype Channelography (http://channelography.rattlecentral.com/) we will explore the challenges and dangers of collecting data and trying to make meaning of it.

So of course, it would be great if friends could vote for my talk, although there’s some great proposals like this one for OKcupid to talk and Brian Suda’s rally cry to analyse 15 Petabytes of data from the Large Hadron Collider.

Hollywood is loving the apps

Inception the App

I had multiple people tell me about the Inception App on Apple iOS devices. I think its interesting but not good enough to make me want to rush out and buy a apple device.

Interestingly, Michael Breidenbrücker is one of the guys behind the app. I know Michael from my course at Ravensbourne where he co-founded Last.FM and decided to go off and develop that away from the fingers of the college. Recently… he’s been focusing on RJDJ which is a music generation tool.

Anyway, the idea of Augmented sound isn’t new but its so so interesting. The rest of the app is well a little bit of a wet squid in my view but hey you can’t have it all. The app is pretty expensive but you do get a copy of the film tied to the app. There is a question in my mind if buying the app for 10 pounds and getting the ability to tweet and like sections is actually worth it.

Ether way, you can see Hollywood jumping into the app market in a big way in 2011. Warner brothers already have a Dark knight app too, while the Unstopable app is Fox’s work and runs on Android (the largest platform now).

I do find it intriguing that Inception isn’t available on Android, I wonder if the lack of content protection mechanism (or plainly put DRM) might be the problem for Warner Brothers? No problem for Fox or even Sony though…

Littlewood letter con for a shower radio

I tend not to get any of these because I’m pretty protective about my details. But somehow this one got through because, I believe Argos are part of the same group and I bought a very cool wind up shower radio online.

I saw the radio on the argos website when booking my slower cooker (more on this soon) as I’ve been looking for a decent radio to listen to my podcasts in the shower room for a while. Unfortunately I don’t have power in the shower room, not even a charger for my electric razor. I consider putting one in and even running a power cord under the door but all the power points are too far away for maybe this exact reason? Oh and electrification…

To be fair I do have a shower radio but its years old, runs through 3x rechargeable batteries within a few weeks, sounds crappy and is shaped like Gromit! (cute its not). The new shower radio is highly recommend because it supports headphone out (you can plug this into speakers) and a usb charger if you can’t be bothered to wind it. The audio quality is also light years in front of my old gromit radio.

So anyway I got this letter in the post looking pretty official, once I opened it, I released it was spam.

It claimed you won between £15 to £1500 pounds but to claim it you will need to setup a credit account. I get this kind of rubbish in my email all the time and I usually hit delete or the spam button (which ever one I can be bothered to hit first) but I’ve never seen it in letter form before. I shall have to be a lot more careful in the future.

The small print for a Littlewoods application

Banned from the Sony network? Head to Xlink Kai

Sony is kicking Playstation3 Users off the PlayStation network if they have any kind of hacked firmware is what I heard on Technews today yesterday.

It looks like Sony’s making good on a promise to ban PS3 users who’ve hacked or elected to run unauthorized software on their consoles. Members of hacking site PS3Hax claim Sony’s already wielding its banhammer against "jailbroken" PS3s, knocking the consoles off the company’s PlayStation Network permanently.

I instantly thought… Well if I was in that position I would simply use the Xlink Kai network

XLink Kai: Evolution VII lets you connect with other console users around the world, and play online games for free. XLink Kai: Evo VII tricks your console into thinking that the other users it is connecting to over the Internet, are actually part of a Local Area Network. This is the basis of system-link gaming, where friends would gather around in the same house and play over 2 or more consoles. With XLink Kai: Evo VII, you now have the option to test your skills out with anybody in the world. As for the technical aspects of tunnelling network packets, we won’t bore you with that…

Fascinating project with some real interesting technology, ok its more hassle that simply logging on to xbox live or what ever but its free and you can people on different consoles.